Post-match: San Jose Earthquakes - Houston Dynamo (Saturday, 4/14) postgame thread [R]

Wasn't one of Houston's Latin players formerly one of our Latin players, acquired via trade for another Latin player?

 

Yes, I would call that a wash - drop one, acquire another, and that was done during the Doyle / Dom era. I'm talking more about the Fioranelli era, which has a pretty heavy Euro bent. And as far as I know, Jesse has yet to acquire a single MLS player. He has only disposed of them.

 

Peddling fake news again?
Most Georgians consider themselves European.

 

...either that, or American southeasterners.

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...opean_country_what_does_that_really_mean.html

 

Was at the game, may have been one of the ugliest I can remember. Really not a ton of quality either way. I understand the need to experiment and shake up the lineup, not sure it worked great but team is work in progress so whatever... although with the talent we have things should be going better. Scary center-back pairing. Tarbell played solid, though (edit: just read through the thread and see a lot of complaints about his distribution... sure, but at least he finally had command of the box and made some good saves).

Oh, and there should have been 6+ minutes of 2nd half stoppage NOT INCLUDING Amarikwa's injury but they put up 3 on the board. North side AR, who does that line for a ton of games, was awful as usual, lucky it didn't cost us any goals.

 

The frustrating thing to me is we are not smart and skillful enough as a team to play passing games, yet we are also not equipped to play with physicality and speed. We got caught in the middle and did nothing well consistently.

Do we know how we want to play? Do we have the players who understand and execute that decided playing style?

Right now the recipe to beat the Quakes is to high press and flood our half with players. Also, put a fast winger on each side to pin us down and beat us with pace. Since all our attacking players like to move infield, that leaves more for our outside back to cover. Being occupied by the other team's wingers, not only our outside backs can't join the attack but they also have more one on one foot race to deal with.

 

BTW, there is some disagreement about what formation the Quakes played. Some people want to call it 4-5-1 or 4-1-4-1 (I think it plays more like 4-3-2-1), but both Stahre and Wondo called it 4-3-3. In any case the idea is to try to get the ball more often in the final 3rd by moving Eriksson and Vako a little further upfield. Whether you want to treat them as part of the front line or an "advanced" part of the midfield is just semantics.

 

Whatever the formation was, there was the usual glaring lack of ability to play through the midfield. A couple times I pointed out my friend who was at the game with me that when our defenders have the ball and are looking to play out out of the back our midfielders don't do enough to show for the ball. That just leads to our defenders choosing a high risk/low reward pass, or play back to Tarbell and put him under pressure, which often leads to a poor attempt from him trying to play out of the back.

 

Sorry, I guess it wasn't clear that I was implying the xGD was a bit BS for that game. It wasn't as bad as that. I am sorry, but I have watched almost every MLS game this season for every team (thanks, free MLS streaming) and I can say that xGD is limited. It rates certain near-misses very heavily and rates other near-misses very lightly. The game wasn't that bad. Really, that awful turnover aside, the game was very close.

 

The xGD was significantly worse than I expected, but I wouldn't call the game "close". I think by naked eye we tend to over-value certain things and under-value other things. That's where an objective statistic like this helps. We can say "but if Quintana just got that header on frame!", and that is a lasting impression, but then there are all the other shots that factor into it, 28 in all. When a team has 19 shots like Houston had, that's going to tend to rack up the xG if they are not all real low percentage.

Even if it was just -1.2 instead of -2.2, it would be one of the highest negatives (worst home performances) in MLS this year. And even if you just look at shots, Houston had more than 2x the number. That factors into it. That should never happen at home unless you got an early big lead and you are bunkering out for a good deal of the game, which was clearly not the case in this game.

 

Does anyone have any insights or observations (or opinions) about Stahre's postgame on-field team "lectures"? I'm not sure what to make of this, if anything, but it strikes me as a bit unusual at this level.

 

As I warned in the offseason about Stahre, his teams tend to play very direct. We are tied for #1 in MLS for long passes per game, and 3rd for fewest short passes. And we don't really have the players to play a quick passing / possession game. Players like Alashe, Eriksson, Vako, Flo are not well suited to it. Actually we have some who are better suited to it, but they are sitting on the bench or in street clothes.

When's the last time you've noticed a Quakes player execute a give and go, this season?

 

It reminds me of what the coaches used to do in AYSO honestly.

 

Tarbell threw the ball to the opposition. With his hands. But we saved a bunch of money by not negotiating with our last goalkeeper!
Hard for me to understand the issue folks had with Jackson. I thought he was great, but I'll rewatch the first 30.
Lima is out best and most consistent player. Enjoy him while you can, and root for him to get to Europe quickly...
Oh and Flo is our best centerback, but he played on the right, while moving Nick to the left. Despite having two left backs on the bench (well, 1.5)

 

Though he blew that toss, I would like to see him throw it out more often.

Jackson started out with several mistakes, but, then improved as the game went on.

That would be shame for us, but, good for Nick. If he ever does go I hope we get a nice chunk of money for him

Lima went to the left to mark the Houston speedster on that side. I think if Stahre was not so worried about Elis? we would have seen a different looking back line. Perhaps Shea or Qwi would have been on the left and Flo at centerback instead of Affolter.

 

Did I see Jesse distributing juice boxes after the Stahre postgame team talk, or was I just imagining it??

 

Watched the game last night. (I was out over the weekend. That's going to be a running theme this season.)

I was struck by a couple of things.

First, gross lack of cohesion.

Second, some of our dudes are rusty.

Third, Houscum, like NyckF#ck and PU before them, played us physically. That is, the fouled the day lights out of us. They should have seen four or five yellow cards in the first half.

We have to find a better way to respond to this. We tried appealing to the Ref against the DyanaMoe Humms, but that was no help. Other teams have tried throwing us off our game by getting physical, and to some extent, it's working.

Also, as several poster here have observed, we are not a cohesive team. It's hard to point to a given player and say: "He was terrible!" Individually, some of our guys did well, but it's the working together part where we break down.

Go Quakes!!

- Mark

 

WTF surely the team has a translator, at least for the Spanish-speaking players?
I know I've seen videos put out by other teams where the coaching instructions are being relayed to the Spanish-speaking players, either by a translator or an assistant coach who speaks Spanish.

 

Two of their Latin players are Quakes rejects (Ceren and Alvarez)... of course those are not their difference-makers, that would be guys like Elis, Manotas, Martinez, Quioto, Cabezas, etc.

 

Arturo Alvarez is American. Born in Houston.

Maybe not really American, because Texas considers itself a whole other country. And it's self-perception that counts, at least from Earthshaker's stand-point.

 

I raised this issue on these boards years ago, maybe even in the Watson era.

Ricky Dorrego, team administrator, speaks Spanish. Certainly, translating shouldn't be his job. The role probably falls to one of the Spanish speaking players or is not covered at all. Maybe the polyglot super GM whose shine is fading?

How about Muma? Maybe his English isn't so great. I bet he can still play a mean center back and he knows how to distinguish between his teammates and opponents on the field.

 

But don't forget his caps are with El Salvador...

 

They are certainly more latin than Georgia is asian.

 

Beita's caps are with Iran. But he's a San Jose home-grown. Didn't know I was living in an Islamic Republic.